by A. N. Wilson
Wilson, therefore, had formidable problems on his return as Prime Minister in 1974. But the warring of the left, both with itself and with the right of the party and the near-collapse of the economy, paled beside the everlasting problem of Marcia. In order to appease Mary, he had made the decision that they would no longer reside at Downing Street, but continue to live in their house in Lord North Street. But on the very day of the election, when he went to Number 10 to resume his office, Marcia went with him, and the front door had no sooner shut than she was shouting at him. ‘Now you are back…you don’t need me any more!’9 From the Marcia angle, it had been a tense election. Things had been going well for Labour. J. Enoch Powell, as popular for his denunciations of Europe as for his hostility to Pakistani immigrants, had urged his supporters to vote Labour, to give them a chance to vote in a referendum to get Britain out of the Common Market. There had been the 8 percent muddle over miners’ pay, revealing that Heath had called the whole election on a false premise. So far, so good. And then the newspapers began to break the story of Marcia Williams’s brother Tony Field, some slag heaps which had been bought on spec near Wigan, and sold to a dodgy property developer called Ronald Millhench. The Daily Mail had attempted to print a story before the election, which suggested that Wilson himself had been involved in the land speculation. The faithful Arnold Goodman issued writs and both the Mail and the Express were silenced. But by the time Wilson was Prime Minister the story was out.
Tony Field had indeed bought slag heaps at Ince-in-Makerfield, near Wigan, and a stone quarry. At a time when the Labour Party was formally committed to taking land into public ownership, Marcia’s brother was responding to the property boom of 1971 and selling on his slag heaps, with planning permission attached, first to a group of companies run by one Victor Harper of Birmingham, who in turn sold on to Ronald Millhench, who also bought a larger neighbouring site without planning permission. It turned out that Tony Field sometimes used Harold Wilson’s office, and that Millhench had stolen some of Wilson’s personal writing paper. For this, and more serious offences, he was eventually to be gaoled in November 1974.
It was clear that the wisest course of action for Wilson would be to answer questions about the whole matter as lightly as possible in the House of Commons, and otherwise ignore it, and wait for it to blow away. This was the advice given to him by Joe Haines, and by his new policy adviser from the London School of Economics, Bernard Donoughue. Their advice was ignored, and Wilson ponderously rose in the Commons on 4 April to insist that Marcia’s brother Field was engaged not in ‘speculation’ but ‘land reclamation’. Thousands of column inches were now given to the matter in the press–over 6,000 inches between 3 and 11 April alone. Wilson and Marcia had unwisely declared war on Fleet Street, and the journalists were preparing their counterblasts. Only when Walter Terry, the father of her two children, threatened to take legal action were the papers prevented from splashing the (hitherto secret) existence of her illegitimate offspring all over the Daily Express. In the midst of the furore, Wilson played one of his boldest cards. Far from severing relations with Marcia, or putting a distance between the Prime Minister’s office and her at the time of the press’s obsession with slag heaps and reclamation, Harold Wilson recommended Marcia’s name to the Queen, and she was created a Life Peer. Harvey Smith was a show jumper who had caused a stir when he stuck two fingers up to show his disapproval of some onlookers. Wilson, in recommending Marcia’s name to the Queen, informed the monarch that he intended to ‘do a Harvey Smith’ at the press. Astonishingly, the Queen appears to have accepted this as a good enough reason for making Marcia into Baroness Falkender on 23 July 1974. It was often said during our times that the Queen ‘never put a foot wrong’. Yet a conspicuous feature of her life as Head of State was the way in which she accepted recommendations for peerages, and eventually the complete rearrangement of the Upper House, without any apparent question. In this, she differed markedly from George V, who prevented Asquith from acting upon the threat to create five hundred Liberal peers to force through Lloyd George’s Budget. There was no reason at all, constitutional or otherwise, why the monarch could not have questioned Marcia’s right to become a pensioned legislator for the rest of her natural life; just as common sense and common decency should surely have prevented the Queen from ennobling Jeffrey Archer (perjurer, liar, cheat) or Conrad Black (shady businessman, asset stripper and eventually imprisoned fraudster) or the extraordinary gang of unworthies elevated by Tony Blair, having offered loans or gifts to the New Labour project. The Queen had many virtues but political courage was not one of them, and in allowing Parliament thus to fall further into disrepute she must be said to have ‘put a foot wrong’.
Harold Wilson’s final administration was marked–or marred–by appointments which seemed like bad jokes. Having done ‘a Harvey Smith’ to the press by allowing Marcia a peerage, he then did ‘the same’ to the Church. The time came for Michael Ramsey to retire as Archbishop of Canterbury. The idea was mooted that one of the great Chadwick brothers should immediately be appointed to Canterbury, even though neither of them was a Bishop. Henry Chadwick, a patristic scholar of brilliance, was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and his brother Owen was Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Both would have brought distinction to the role of Archbishop; Ramsey had a low view of the Archbishop of York, Donald Coggan–the Cog–and allowed Wilson to know it. The Cog was the most senior evangelical churchman of his day, becoming Bishop of Bradford in 1956 and Archbishop of York in 1961. He had ‘peaked’ when becoming Principal of the London College of Divinity in 1944, and was quite unsuited for high ecclesiastical office. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister did not heed Ramsey’s advice, and appointed the Cog.10 or Donald Duck as Private Eye immediately christened him. Coggan was not without excellent personal qualities. He had a beautiful voice, and he was one of those strange individuals who could pick up a language almost immediately. He had only to attend a liturgy in Africa to grasp, by the end of an hour, the basic morphology of Hausa or Swahili. But he was not up to the task of public office. And by appointing him, Wilson then left the Archbishopric of York vacant. Three bishops in a row refused the offer to replace him. ‘I am puzzled and concerned by the difficulties which have arisen. I fear that at least some of the story must be known to some of the Bishops and others. I therefore think that the person next approached will have to be told quite frankly that there have been these difficulties. I hope that you and the Archbishop of Canterbury will then be prepared to apply all decent pressure on that person to see a call to York as, among other things, a duty to be undertaken for the good of the church. Our next attempt must succeed.’11 Astonishingly, all they could come up with was another dud–Stuart Blanch, an agoraphobic, who suffered a nervous breakdown in 1981,12 having been the most undistinguished Archbishop of York in the 1,300 years or so of the province’s history. But if the elevation of Donald Duck, Stuart Blanch and Baroness Falkender represented new ‘lows’ in the history of the Church and state, Wilson, the lover of Gilbert and Sullivan, had one final flourish up his sleeve before he left the stage.
Many of the G and S operettas contain jokes about the House of Lords. Perhaps these sank more deeply into Wilson’s subconscious than the more earnest request, from the left of the Labour Party since its inception, to uproot or abolish the legislative rights of the peers. At every State Opening of Parliament, the peerage of England would be assembled in their robes of ermine and scarlet. As Wilson trudged from the Commons to the Lords, for his final State Opening, it is probably safe to guess that the merry airs of Sir Arthur Sullivan and the frivolous words of W. S. Gilbert were singing inside his tired head. The dingy wife Mary continued to be the ‘martyr’, regarding his return to office as Labour Prime Minister, not as a personal triumph for him, but as an inconvenience to herself. ‘Of course I hate it. But then I always have. But I do my job.’13 Marcia continued to supply strident ‘noises off’. Week in, week out, Wilson had to be an embarrassed
witness to such scenes as when, during the State Visit of the Prime Minister of Fiji, the food was not served the second everyone sat at table. Marcia strode out in front of everyone and yelled at Patrick Wright, the private secretary for foreign affairs, ‘Don’t you dare ever again allow people to sit down if their food is not ready to be served immediately.’14 Her tirades and harangues against poor Harold never let up. He had never had any close friends. He was what Goodman called a philistine. It was hard to imagine into what comforting retreat he could crawl, without the help of alcohol and the semi-merciful humiliations of early dementia.
As upon its lordly way
This unique procession passes,
Tarantara! Tzing! Boom!
Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes!
Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow ye masses!
Blow the trumpets, bang the brasses!
Tarantara! Tzing! Boom!
We are peers of highest station
Paragons of legislation,
Pillars of the British nation!15
We do not know when exactly he decided to resign, but he must have known that he was to do so, as he led the Commoners into the House of Peers for the last time. Was there anarchic playfulness in his mind? When a man is gripped with hatred for the women who are making his life a misery, he often realises that the worst punishment he could inflict upon them would be to give them precisely what they asked for. To poor Mary, he gave the quiet domestic life for which she had always begged: only now he was suffering from incipient Alzheimer’s and was condemning her to be the nurse of a mental defective. He punished Marcia by making her friends into peers and knights, thereby alerting the world to their deplorable defects of character. Bernard Donoughue wrote of Marcia: ‘He often indulged her wildest whims almost like a daughter…and equally, seemed to fear her like a fierce mother (as when he physically hid from her intimidating telephone calls)… Somehow over the previous twenty or so years, she had frightened Harold Wilson and reduced him to a dependence which was sometimes pathetic to observe.’16
Resignation honours lists were traditionally reserved for personal service to the Prime Minister. So it was that Harold Wilson, when he knew that he was going to lay down his office, made his first list, containing the names of the driver, Bill Housden, the cook Mrs Pollard, three of Marcia’s long-suffering secretaries and some Number 10 civil servants. But there was another list, written on lavender writing paper, and it was this list with which Harold Wilson’s name would be forever associated. If it was intended as some kind of anarchic joke, it could certainly be seen as effective, since after the ennoblement and glorification of the names upon it, it was impossible for anyone in Britain to take seriously either the honours system or the House of Lords.
Among the names on the list was Jacob Kagan, a textile manufacturer responsible for Wilson’s awful ‘signature’ Gannex macs. He was a thug, known to offer physical violence to anyone, including women, who stood in his way. He approached the journalist Peter Jenkins asking him if he could procure women for him. He was eventually gaoled in December 1978 for serious currency offences.17 Together with other Wilson peers, such as Lords Plurenden, Kissin and Schon, Kagan had trade interests in the Soviet bloc. Then there were the showbiz names. David Frost was written down for a peerage, though Arnold Goodman eventually persuaded Wilson to cross his name off the Lavender List.18 Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont were there, and George Weidenfeld, implausible publisher, bon vivant, wheeler and dealer, all soon to be summoned into the Second Chamber and described in Her Majesty’s words as her trusty and well-beloved friends.
Then there were knighthoods–for James Hanson and James Goldsmith, both of whom had given large sums to the Conservative Party. Goldsmith was apparently knighted for ‘services to exports’ even though his company, Cavenham Foods, had only 0.4 percent of its sales overseas.19 Then there was Eric Miller, the boss of the Peachey Property Company, a close friend of Marcia. Some people expected them to marry, especially when he offered to take her on a private visit to Israel–though this trip eventually fell through.20 When Miller’s wife protested against the relationship with Lady Falkender, Marcia went to bed, telephoning the Prime Minister in the middle of an important conference in Brussels to tell him that he must get in touch with Eric Miller at once and persuade Miller not to give her up, whatever his wife insisted. Miller was eventually offered only a knighthood. He shot himself in 1977, before a censorious DTI report was published which revealed his dodgy business dealings at Peachey Property.
On 27 May The Times described the list as ‘a bizarre one for a socialist ex-Prime Minister’. The majority of honorands were ‘capitalists of a tough risk-taking type’–i.e., Jews. ‘Are they really his friends for whom he feels the warmth of personal gratitude?’ Donoughue answered that with the information that Wilson himself said, on the day he left office, that he barely knew half of them. One of his Cabinet colleagues was quoted in the Sunday Times of 30 May 1976: ‘A pity about Harold. Such a graceful exit–and then he had to do this on the doorstep.’21
18
Lucky Jim
On 16 March 1976, Harold Wilson suddenly announced that he was resigning as Prime Minister. He had developed advanced paranoia, a personal condition which spreads its sufferings to those in the sufferer’s environs. For some years he had believed that the secret services were plotting against him–a theory borne out when the ex-MI5 officer Peter Wright published his sensational Spycatcher in 1986, revealing that some of his fellow intelligence officers believed Wilson to be a Soviet agent. They thought that Gaitskell had been murdered by the KGB so as to place ‘their’ man in Number 10 Downing Street. James Angleton, the American counter-intelligence chief, gave weight to the belief that Wilson was a Soviet agent. There was indeed a plot among MI5 officers to oust Wilson, but the men involved were comparatively junior and the upper echelons of the service quashed the conspiracy long before it took effect.1
Whether or not Wilson had any inkling of the plots themselves, or whether he had merely imagined the existence of them, his persecution mania caught on, and the press was slow to believe that there was nothing sinister in his resignation. They looked around feverishly for evidence of some secret wrongdoing which would subsequently ‘come out’.
Wilson’s wrongdoings as Prime Minister, however, were not concealed. They had been apparent for all to see–a dithering and indecisive foreign policy, and gross mismanagement of the economy. He had capped it all by ennobling a gang of scoundrels in his Resignation Honours List.
As happens with all but the most unusual of Prime Ministers, Wilson vanished without trace. His actual reason for resigning was that he had begun to recognise in himself the signs of incipient dementia. It was not for this reason, though, that he was forgotten so quickly. He simply had not added up to anything. His very great cleverness was all skin-deep, and the philistinism, which so troubled his friend and adviser Arnold Goodman, and the lack of interest outside politics, dealt its own cruel punishment. When the political life was over, Wilson’s life and reputation were over, too, though he lingered on, a twilit existence, first on the back benches of the Commons, then in the House of Lords, and finally with his wife in a flat off Victoria Street. He who had once possessed a photographic memory for Treasury figures and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics was now unable to remember his own name.2
Wilson’s departure provided the Labour Party with an opportunity to choose a leader with more depth or integrity. It was one which it passed by. On the right of the party, Social Democrats Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey were both plausible leaders. They were well read, and well rounded in all senses, their Balliol bumptiousness being no obvious barrier to office. On the left, there was the colourful and intelligent figure of Michael Foot, who was eventually to have his turn as leader, and to demonstrate just how unelectable the left could become. Foot was by far the most powerful ally Margaret Thatcher had in her political career. His extreme stances on matters as varied as Europe, the armed forces and the econom
y would have guaranteed any Conservative leader the victory in a General Election. Denis Healey, a bruiser as well as an intellect, would have given Thatcher a run for her money. Woy Jenkins would have offered the middle classes what he would no doubt have considered a very civilised alternative to Conservative government. Instead, when Wilson resigned, the Labour Party elected the party apparatchik, the backroom fixer Leonard James Callaghan (1912–2005), a figure much less distinguished even than Wilson himself. He would manage to get into The Guinness Book of Records for two feats over which he had little control. Until the arrival of Gordon Brown, Callaghan was the tallest Prime Minister in British history (six foot one), and he turned out to be the longest lived. Apart from this pair of boring statistics, he had absolutely no distinction of character or of intellect. His attempts to compare himself with Baldwin.3 as a safe pair of hands in a crisis overlooked, first, his own record of extreme incompetence in any crisis, and, secondly, Baldwin’s intellectual weight, shown not only in his political canniness but also in the eloquence and depth of his public speeches. Baldwin had his faults, and history has been strict with them–he treated the unemployed with indifferent contempt; he sacked a popular King on a trumped-up charge; he appeased, or appeared to appease, Hitler. Yet beside Callaghan, Baldwin was a giant. Callaghan, who had started out as a white-collar trades union official, was little better than a party hack. He always voted at his party’s call and never thought of thinking for himself at all.